Young Male - How to Disappear in America

Pitchfork 74

In the beginning, New York’s White Material label prized an ethos of function over form, packaging gruff, no-frills techno in plain white sleeves. Their logo depicted a hard-hatted technician strapped to a telephone pole: “Working man’s techno,” they called it. (There is an element of fantasy at work here; a few of the label's artists are RISD grads, and at least one works by day as a graphic designer.) None of the crew’s members stripped his records more mercilessly to the bone than co-founder Young Male, aka Quinn Taylor, who came up with the label’s slogan during a stint working in a hand tool factory.

As recently as September, when he released Hot for Destiny and the Street, his second full EP for the label, Young Male was still applying himself primarily to stern, basement-quaking floor-fillers. His peers, meanwhile, had developed distinct musical identities: Galcher Lustwerk became known for his barbiturate house beats and hypnotic baritone; DJ Richard’s debut album, for Dial, put a chilly ambient spin on techno. Both producers’ music is unmistakable for the work of anyone else, but Young Male’s minor-key throb felt ego-free, a kind of ur-techno that was less about authorial genius than collective release: DJ tools meant to keep dancefloors running smoothly.

Now, though, with his debut album, Taylor makes his own pivot toward auteur status. How to Disappear in America sounds unlike anything he’s done before. This is not a dance record. The tracks are short and sketch-like. The tempos are slow, the lighting crepuscular. A few tracks feature no beats at all, and when percussion does appear, it’s a rickety pitter-pat pulse that sounds as cutting-edge as the home organ in your great-aunt’s living room, and as hard-hitting as the tapping fingernails of an ASMR video.

John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s influence looms large over the record’s pensive pulses and gravelly pedal tones. How to Disappear in America resembles a soundtrack in other ways, too. Its titles read like film cues (“Franklin’s Theme,” “Into the Night,” “Fade”) and its pursuit of atmosphere is all-consuming. It is resolutely minor-key, and his analog synths have a bitter tinge to them.

Occasionally, a pinprick of light punctuates the murk. “Muzak” makes surprising use of fretless bass and oily tenor saxophone, evoking the glass bricks and neon lights of a decades-old softcore video found in a discarded box of VHS tapes. And while “Carrier” is little more than a gloomy bass pulse buffeted by a cold, unforgiving wind, there's a hint of the Durutti Column in the silvery guitar line that sprouts from it like a sturdy desert cactus.

Mostly, though, bleakness predominates. “Into the Night” channels the drone of bomber jets into a short, sinister ambient sketch, and “Franklin’s Theme” wraps its hi-hat rhythms with a coppery and noxious monotone. “Reveal (Pacific Coast Highway 1 Version)” is strikingly reminiscent of the Cure’s “Carnage Visors,” the soundtrack to a film the band opened their concerts with on 1981’s Picture tour.

That song, reissued on the expanded edition of Faith, stretched a single riff into a 28-minute dirge, and Young Male’s short, funereal album—itself just 28 minutes long—functions in similar ways. Almost claustrophobic in its cohesion, it sounds like it was made using only a handful of obsolete machines, and the manner in which it worries away at the same few sounds and themes suggests a certain weary fatalism, a sense of running out of options. In Young Male’s America, all roads are dead ends.